Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - “The Giggling Granny” – Nannie Doss

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

“The Giggling Granny”, Nannie Doss’ home cooked meals were served with a side of poison. Was she suffering from Munchausen-by-Proxy, or did she just feel trapped by mid-20th century society? Greg and Vanessa examine how a troubled childhood, brain damage, and an abusive husband led this killer to snap and go after everyone who was closest to her.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Due to the graphic nature of this killer's crimes, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes dramatizations and discussions of murder and assault that some people may find offensive. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. Now, enjoy the show. The year is 1953, the place, Tulsa, Oklahoma. A large crowd gathers at the local courthouse. Although many criminals come and go through these halls every day, this one is different. reporters cram the halls eager to get a look at the latest, most sensational serial killer in town.

As the door to the courthouse opens and the killer was let outside, the reporters burst into questions. The killer acknowledges them with a wide smile and charming laugh, reveling their attention. She's like no other killer the crowd has ever seen. She doesn't look like a cold-blooded murderer of four husbands and several more family members. She's plump and bespectacled, gregarious, and friendly. She looks more like somebody's sweet southern grandmother. There's one question on everyone's mind. A reporter steps up to ask her.

Why did you do it, Mrs. Dawes? Why did you kill your husband? And her answer? Well, that's simple, darling. He got on my nerves. Sometimes evil lurks in the last place you'd expect. If we've learned anything from digging into the lives of the most notorious serial killers, It's that they don't always take the form of misanthropes and social outcasts.

The most cold-blooded of them all could look like just about anyone. A charismatic businessman, an attractive couple. Or a kindly grandmother with a passion for cooking. Appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes dangerously so. The killer we'll be talking about today is far from what you would normally picture when you think of a serial killer. And yet she committed some of the most despicable acts imaginable.

Not only did she murder grown men with shocking regularity, she also preyed on the most helpless people she could find, children and the elderly, all, apparently, for nothing more than greed. But even in what might seem to be the most cliched motive of all, there's plenty of underlying psychology to dig into. And Nanny Doss, our latest subject, has a lot to unpack. Although her crimes are little known today,

she committed some of the most horrific murders of the mid-year, 20th century. Operating throughout the southern states of the U.S., Das escaped capture for nearly 30 years due to her frequent crossing of state lines after claiming a victim. She killed at least eight people across Alabama, North Carolina, Kansas, and Oklahoma, between 1927 and 1954, and may have killed as many as 11, most of them, members of her own family. Her constant movement and seemingly cheerful demeanor made her as difficult to detect as her weapon of choice.

Poison. Today, we're going to dig into the motivations that would push someone to commit the worst crimes imaginable for money and how that same someone could choose personal profit over the lives of their family members. Hi, I'm Greg Polson,

and this is serial killers, a podcast diving into the minds and motives of the world's most notorious serial killers. This week, we're going to look look into the life of Nanny Doss. If you want to listen to any previous episodes of serial killers, you can find them all on your favorite podcast directories or on our website, parcast.com, spelled p-a-r-c-s-t-t-t-tac-st-com. Don't forget to subscribe because a new episode comes out every Monday.

Now, I'm here with my criminal psychology-loving co-host, Vanessa Richardson. Hey, Vanessa. Hi, welcome back. It's important to note that Vanessa is not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but like me, She is fascinated by the psychology of serial killers and has done a lot of research to answer our questions for this show. Thanks, Greg. Welcome. As serial killers go, Nanny Doss is a bit of an outlier.

We've already discussed on this show how female serial killers are a relative rarity. Statistics from Radford University's serial killer database show that 11.4% of all serial killers are female. If we narrow it down further to only include serial killers operating in the United States, that number drops to 9.2%. Those numbers seem to track with the common perception of your average murderer. When you think serial killer, statistically you tend to picture Caucasian and male, right? I know I do. Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer, son of Sam. I could go on. I know you could. But it's much harder for most people to rattle off a long list of female serial killers. Part of it may have to do with the tendency for male killers to get a bigger spotlight during their trials

and sentencing, and part of it may be that less women feel the need to kill again and again, or maybe it's just that women are better at getting away with it. How so? Well, in general terms, female killers prefer methods of killing that are quieter and less messy, which makes their mark much less obvious. While male killers gravitate towards stabbing, shooting, or beating their victim to death, women tend to gravitate toward one method in particular, poison. A study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Vyxiexie.

showed that in a sample of 62 victims killed by female serial killers, more than half, 57% were killed by poison. That's interesting. Why poison in particular? Well, the answer lies in the reasons why women kill. While men usually kill for pleasure, women tend to kill for financial or personal gain. They want to get something tangible out of the killing, be it money or power or even liberation from an abusive parent or partner. It's not usually for fun as much as it is a means to an end. For that reason, poison has long been seen as a woman's murder weapon of choice. It makes sense when you think of it in terms of historical gender roles. As homemakers, no man would suspect his wife to have poisoned his supper

if she had cooked dinner for him every night before. So for all the guys who tell women to stay in the kitchen, watch out. It might be where she's at her most dangerous. Poison was good for plenty of other reasons, too. It was cheap and easy to obtain. All you'd have to do is go to the corner store and tell the clerk you've got a rat problem, and you could walk home with a box of poison and no one would think twice. Death by poison could also pass as a death of natural causes,

as long as you didn't give anyone reason to look too closely. That's true. While it's easy to pass off vomiting and diarrhea as an unrelated illness, it's pretty hard to claim that a stab wound happened naturally. Right. This was especially true when the poison was administered gradually over seven, several meals. In small enough doses, death could take days, even weeks to take effect. And over a long enough period of time, it becomes harder and harder for anyone to pinpoint exactly

who did the poisoning. So it's practically the silent and effective killer. So what kind of poisons were most popular for this kind of murder? Well, arsenic, definitely. There's a reason why it's been called the poison of kings. It's been used to usurp royal power and break apart dynasties for centuries. It's an element that is actually naturally occurring in the human body and trace amounts are even necessary for proper function. But too much arsenic can cause vomiting, diarrhea, brain damage, internal bleeding, and organ failure. Arsenic first gained popularity as a murder weapon during the Middle Ages when the cholera epidemic

was sweeping through Europe, since arsenic poisoning symptoms were similar to the symptoms of cholera. Of course. If everyone was dying of cholera, no one would think to look for arsenic. And those symptoms were vague enough for arsenic. to continue its use as a difficult to detect poison well into the 20th century. Although arsenic has had other uses throughout history as a paint, medicine, and cosmetic, among others, it's become most famous as a poison for the most devious of murders, and much of its name recognition for modern audiences comes from one source in particular. But look, darling, how did he die?

Oh, Mortimer, don't be so inquisitive. The gentleman died because he drank. some wine with poison in it. Frank Capra's 1944 classic film, Arsenic and Old Lace, came from a play of the same name. The movie version follows Carrie Grant as Mortimer Brewster, a young man who returns to his family home to visit his elderly aunts, Abby and Martha Brewster.

He soon finds that the Brewster sisters have been luring in and killing strangers with elderberry wine laced with arsenic and bearing their bodies in the basement. And while that seems like the setup to a slasher film or perhaps a dark and gritty drama, it's actually a hilarious comedy. Yes. Most of the comedy comes to the fact that the Brewster Sisters are exceedingly polite and good nature. They just have a nasty habit of wanting to end the suffering of the lonely

old bachelors they're bringing in for drinks. We have no way of knowing whether or not Nanny Das took any inspiration from the Brewster Sisters when she was planning her dark deeds. But the resemblance is uncanny. At her trial, Das seemed pretty good-natured herself. laughing and joking about her victims to the point where the press dubbed her The Giggling Granny. And like the Brewsters, Das also targeted lonely men, ensnaring her victims through lonely hearts advertisements in local newspapers. But her motives were a bit less altruistic than the fictional Brewsters. Right. As we said before, Das was primarily motivated by greed, cashing in on large life insurance policies she took out on her victims.

She confessed to killing four husbands and four families. members in all, and her laughter when recounting her role in their deaths actually points to an underlying psychopathy. The FBI report on psychopathy and serial murder identifies glibness, a lack of remorse and or guilt, and lack of empathy as red flags for psychopathic personality disorder. But what is psychopathic personality disorder? And what does it have to do with serial killers? Psychopathy is a disorder marked by the use of charm, manipulation, intimidation, and occasionally violence to control others in order to satisfy selfish needs. Not all psychopaths go on to become serial killers, plenty of them go on to lead relatively normal lives, but many serial killers

are psychopaths, or at least exhibit some of their traits. They don't see their victims as people, just a mark that they can manipulate to get what they want. So how does a person become a psychopath? Is it just something they're born with, or does it develop over time? Well, Greg, the jury's still out on that one, but looking at Nanny Doss's life, it is clear that if any upbringing could reliably produce a psychopath, hers would be one of them. We'll return to our story in just a moment. Where's your playlist taking you? Down the highway, to the mountains, or just into daydream mode while you're stuck in traffic. With over 4,000 hotels worldwide, Best Western is there to help you make the most of your getaway. Wherever that is. Because the only thing that's, the only thing

better than a great playlist is a great trip. Life's the trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Book direct and save at bestwestern.com. Now, our story continues. Nanny Doss was born in 1905 in a poor farming community in Alabama. Her parents, James and Louisa Hazel, named their daughter Nancy, but she soon gained the nickname of Nanny because of her sweet disposition. Even as a child, Nanny loved to laugh. Being the oldest of five children on a family farm, Nanny's schooling was put on hold in favor of putting her to work. She was expected to tend to the farm and her four younger siblings with the kind of passivity exemplified by her mother, the perfect image of a hardworking

farmer's wife. But this image was only skin deep. In reality, the Hazel household was a miserable one to grow up in. Muddy and food were in short supply at the farm, and with poverty looming its ugly head at every corner, Nanny's father's mean street grew deeper and deeper. James Hazel was a controlling and cruel man, who forbade his wife and daughters from going to social events or wearing makeup or wearing any clothing he deemed inappropriate. He claimed that he wanted to keep them on the family farm for their own protection, but it was clear that he just wanted to keep his family under his thumb. And even if James Hazel's intent had been to keep his daughter's safe from unsavory men, it didn't work.

That's right, because in later confessions, Nanny admitted that she had been raped several times by local men in her youth, although she didn't go into too much detail about who they were or how many times it happened. What she did confirm, however, was that when she told her father, he either didn't believe her stories of being molested or simply didn't care. Well, family members denying claims of rape or even ignoring them entirely is quite common, isn't it? Sadly, yes. And because her father didn't protect her or come to her aid, Nanny always dreamed of finding a prince charming who would come and sweep her off her feet,

taking her far away from her tragic circumstances. Her experiences with men had been uniformly cruel, and she desperately needed a person in her life who would treat her with love and respect. She spent hours locking herself away with her mother's romance magazines, allowing her imagination to create a world where she could be truly loved, not taken advantage of. This desire for romance would come to fuel her darker desires later in life. But for now, the lonely hearts column was pure escapism. But not everyone with a bad childhood grows up to be a murderer, right? Of course not.

But then again, Nanny's childhood seemed to be the perfect storm of events that would lead someone to both desire attention from and deeply distrust men. Although there's no specific record of Nanny's father being physically abusive, he certainly showed sign of psychological abuse. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence lists humiliation, controlling what a victim can or cannot do, isolation, and denying the victim access to money or basic resources, such as education, as key warning signs of psychological abuse.

All those signs definitely describe James Hazel's treatment of his daughter. Absolutely. And psychological abuse like that can have really lasting damage on a victim, often following them for the rest of their lives. But there were other factors at play here. How so? While much of Nanny's personality later in life was clearly shaped by her upbringing, there were also some physical changes that may have affected her as well.

When Nanny was seven years old, she was traveling with her family by train when the train stopped suddenly, causing Nanny to hit her head on a metal pole. Later in life, Nanny would use this incident as an explanation for much of her behavior. But hitting your head would only cause physical damage, right? It couldn't turn someone into a complete sociopath overnight. Not so fast, Greg. Studies have actually shown that head injuries can have numerous effects on the brain,

depending on where the injury occurred. Because the brain is such a complex organ, injuries to the brain can cause anything from loss of memory or bodily functions to noticeable changes in personality. One of the more famous examples of this phenomenon is that of Phineas Gage, a railroad construction worker who in 1848 improbably survived an accident that resulted in a railroad spike being driven directly through his brain. Wow, a spike through the brain and he was okay.

That's incredible. Well, I wouldn't quite say he came out of it okay. Gage did make a miraculous recovery, surviving not only the initial injury itself, but the surgical procedure to remove the spike, which in 1848 was no small feat. Just one month after the accident, Gage was up and walking, and a few weeks after that, he was deemed strong enough to return to his family's home. But that's when things started getting strange. Before the accident, Gage was described as a hardworking, likable man. But after the brain injury, his personality had changed so much that his family hardly recognized him.

He was crude, profane, and antisocial to the point where he barely fit into the rest of polite society. The doctor who had initially treated his injury had this to say about Gage's dramatic change. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was no longer Gage. That's fascinating.

But what does Phineas Gage have to do with Nanny Doss? Possibly quite a lot. Gage's doctor's description of his antisocial behavior sounds a bit like Nanny's disregard for other human beings. And the descriptions of Nanny having a sweet disposition as a child seem very at odds with her later persona of a cold-blooded killer. So what changed? Could it really have been the head injury that she suffered as a child?

Like she claimed while giving her confession? Both she and Phineas Gage would have suffered damage to the first. frontal lobe of the brain, which governs a lot of your day-to-day decision-making, including decisions about what is or is not socially acceptable, or morally right or wrong. It sounds like Nanny's injury exacerbated what were already the makings of a very unstable person. That's very true, and things were only going to get worse. Throughout her troubled childhood, Nanny Hazel dreamed of the day she could escape from her

overbearing abusive father and find the man of her dreams to sweep her off her feet. unfortunately her father had other ideas. When she was 16, James Hazel pressured his daughter into marrying a man named Charlie Braggs, whom she had met only four months previously at the linen thread factory where they both worked. It's likely that since James was so paranoid about the possibility of Nanny's new boyfriend getting her pregnant and skipping town, he wanted to see her married as quickly as possible. And with four other kids to feed, it also benefited him to have her married off and depended on her husband rather than her father.

If Nanny believed that her new husband would grant her the freedom she had always dreamed of, she was sorely mistaken. She was merely trading her father's rule for her new mother-in-laws. Here's what Nanny herself had to say about this new situation. I'm married, as my father wished in 1921, to a boy I'd only known about four or five months, who had no family, only a mother who was unwed and had taken over my life completely when we were married. She never seen anything wrong with what he'd done, but she would take spells.

She would not let my own mother stay all night. Charlie's mother was just as controlling as Nanny's father, if not more so. According to Nanny, her new mother-in-law believed her son could do no wrong, and that Nanny was incapable of doing even the most basic tasks correctly. Despite this, she never lifted a finger to help with the housework. She also severely limited who Nanny could speak to and where she could go outside the house.

And Charlie himself wasn't much help. Despite fathering four children with Nanny and quick succession, he was routinely unfaithful to her, shattering the illusion of her perfect Prince Charming pretty quickly. Something like this could leave a lasting impression. Because infidelity is not only a physical betrayal, but also an emotional one. It can be so devastating that it affects someone's psychological state, too.

Of course, the most common results are that the person who was betrayed builds up walls, sees the opposite sex as the enemy, and seeks to feel powerful since their ego took such a horrible blow. This makes sense, because Nanny retaliated with infidelities of her own, and the constant stress of trying to keep her household together as barely more than a teenager herself drove Nanny to drink and smoke regularly. Even at this stage in her life, Nanny's husband saw signs that she was a dangerous woman to be around.

Years later, he would tell reporters, When she got mad, I wouldn't eat anything she fixed or drink anything around the house. So it's pretty clear that the idea of getting poisoned by his wife wasn't far from his mind. Or perhaps from a more cynical standpoint, Charlie only claimed he suspected his wife was a killer years after the fact in order to cash in on the hype of her arrest. Well, whether Charlie saw it coming or not, his caution wasn't enough to save his two middle daughters. That's right. Nanny Doss's first two victims were her own children. both of whom were toddlers at the time.

In early 1927, Charlie Braggs returned home to find two of his daughters writhing in agony from what Nanny told him must have been food poisoning. The girls died shortly thereafter, and police evidently believed Nanny's story as neither girl was given an autopsy. Charlie, however, wasn't so certain of his wife's innocence and took their oldest daughter, Melvina, and fled,

leaving baby Florine behind in Nanny's care. So Vanessa, why do you think Nanny chose her own daughters as her first victims? Well, unfortunately, we don't have a lot of explanation from Nanny herself as to what sent her over the edge, so to speak. We also don't know why she chose to poison only her middle children and leave her oldest daughter and much more vulnerable infant daughter alive. But for possible motives, we can always look at statistics. FBI data shows that while the murder of very young children is sadly more common than that of children over five years old, it differs in that the murder is usually carried out by a family member. In fact, 71% of murders of children five and under are committed by a family member, usually a father or mother.

The FBI has even estimated that that number may be higher, since deaths from SIDS can look a lot like deaths from suffocation, and deaths from a vicious beating can look like an accidental fall. But Manny's daughter's deaths definitely weren't accidental, right? Well, probably not. Only probably? Like I said, we don't know a whole lot about Nanny's initial motivations. Although many of her later killings were motivated by the profitable life insurance policies she took out on her victims, the fact that she gained very little money from the deaths of her two daughters points to a different motivation.

I'd like to posit that the profile of those initial deaths actually seems a lot like a disorder called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. I think I've heard of Munchausen syndrome. Isn't that where a patient fakes an illness in order to gain? sympathy and attention from people around them? That's right. The disorder actually got its name from a fictional 16th century German nobleman, Baron Munchausen, who tended to tell tall tales about himself, like the time he rode an alligator or traveled to the moon. But Munchausen syndrome by proxy differs from regular Munchausen syndrome, and that the sufferer doesn't fake an illness on themselves, they fake an illness or injury

in another person. Now, why would someone want to do that? Well, usually the support posid sick person is a child of the person with the syndrome, seeking attention and praise for being such a good caregiver to their sick child. In less severe cases, the caregiver simply tells a doctor that their child is having symptoms of an illness, the kind of symptoms that are hard to pin down to any one disease, such as headaches or fevers. Recently, this condition has been in the news due to cases like that of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who killed her mother, Dede after years of being forced to fake illnesses in order to garner money and sympathy. D.D. Blanchard, even went as far as to claim her daughter was several years younger than she actually was,

in order to keep her isolated and at home well into her 20s. I heard about that one. Although the crime Gypsy Rose committed was horrible, it's not difficult to see how she could have been pushed to her breaking point by her mother's Munchausen Biproxie syndrome. That's very true. In a sense, Gypsy Rose's case could have been even worse. In more serious cases of Munchausen by proxy, the caregiver actively induces symptoms of an illness in the their child through methods like poisoning, suffocation, and physical injury. That's horrible. When I got sick as a child, I trusted my parents to be there with some chicken soup to make me feel better, not make me worse. Same here. But luckily, Munchausen syndrome

by proxy is very rare. A recent study published in the Journal of Child Health Care of a single pediatric ward found that less than 1% of all patients showed signs of Munchausen by proxy. And in most of those cases, the perpetrator of the syndrome was the mother of the patient. However, despite its rarity, Munchausen by proxy is one of the most lethal forms of child abuse. In one study, 6% of victims died, and another 7.3% suffered long-term physical injury. So you think Nanny might not have meant to kill her children outright? It's possible she only wanted to make them sick in order to take care of them and be seen as a loving caregiver. We know she was under a lot of stress at the time. She was stuck in a loveless marriage with four young children and a mother-in-law who

constantly criticized her ability as a wife and mother. She was also heavily drinking, which could have impaired her judgment. Maybe Nanny just wanted to be seen as a fit mother, taking care of her children's sudden illness and taking the credit when they miraculously returned to health. However, things didn't turn out that way. The poison was too much for the girl's young bodies to handle, and instead of recovering, they died horribly. That's a very tragic possibility. There may be another motive here as well. And what would that be?

Revenge. Against her own children? What could those girls have done to have warranted revenge? No, not against the children, against her husband. Charlie Braggs was very clear in later interviews that he thought his wife was going to murder him for all of his infidelities and other more minor slights. What if she thought the better revenge was not to kill him, but to kill his children? children. We can look to Greek mythology for some possible answers. You may have heard of the female

character of Medea from Euripides' play by the same name. It was based on the myth of Medea and Jason. In the end, Medea kills her children to get back at her husband, who left her for another woman. She knew how much it would devastate him, and that was the only power she felt she could yield murdering their children. Okay, so that's also a distinct probability. As far back as her early childhood, Nanny both idealized and vilified the men in her life. Although she dreamed of a fairy tale romance, the moment she realized that the man she was with was less than perfect, she would turn on him in a heartbeat. Perhaps it was simply Charlie's infidelity that led her to kill her children in a violent act of petty revenge. But if poisoning her children was Nanny's attempt for revenge against your husband, it didn't really work.

Charlie returned a year later with her daughter Melvina and a new girlfriend in tow, asking for a in exchange for returning their eldest daughter to her mother. Even though he, by his own admission, suspected Nanny of killing two of their children, he was willing to sacrifice his oldest daughter in order to get free of her. Heartless. As heartless as it may have been, his ploy worked. Charlie Braggs remained the only one of Nanny's five husbands to survive matrimony. His instinct to get out quick after the deaths of his daughters may have saved his life.

But for the two surviving daughters in Nanny's care, Melvina and Frina and Florine, there would be a hard road ahead. Now a single mother supporting two kids, Nanny moved back in with her own mother and took a job at the local cotton mill. Our story will continue in a moment after a brief message. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car should feel like one less thing on your list. Not one more. With Carvana, it is. Just go to Carvana.com. And to your license plate or Vin and get a real offer down to the penny. No back and forth, no surprises, just an experience you can trust.

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Now a divorcee. Nanny once again dreamed of a prince charming, one who really did mean it when he told her, I love you. She turned to lonely hearts columns and magazines. like true romance to once again build up the image of her perfect, handsome, and completely unattainable man. Nanny started writing to local bachelors she found in the personal ads, and finally found what she thought was her prince charming.

Frank Harrelson was a 23-year-old factory worker from Jacksonville, who, in letter form, swept Nanny off her feet. He wrote poetry for her, called her beautiful, and didn't seem to mind that she had two young children to raise. On paper, he was the perfect man. and Nanny moved to Jacksonville to remarry at the age of 24. However, Nanny soon learned that her letter-writing prince was more of a toad in person. All of the poetry and florid praise from their correspondence disappeared once she got a ring,

and was instead left with another cheating alcoholic. If anything, Frank was much worse of a husband than Charlie. He had a criminal record for assault and would beat Nanny whenever he'd had too much to drink, which was often. It's hard to feel bad for Nanny Doss when you know she's already killed two of her own children, but she does tend to fall into incredibly unfortunate circumstances. At least she killed Frank immediately, right? No, she didn't. She stayed married to Frank for 16 years.

That's crazy. I've seen happy marriages that didn't last 16 years. How did this abusive marriage between a murderer and a violent alcoholic last that long? Sadly, there can be a lot of reasons why people stay in abusive relationships, that sound crazy to people outside the relationship. But the reasons why Nanny stayed with Frank for so long mirrored many of the reasons why she married Charlie. Nanny had been dependent on abusive men her whole life,

going back as far as her alcoholic father, and as difficult as it is today to be a single mother, it was nearly impossible in the 1930s and 40s to find a job open to women that made enough money to support a family. She might have felt like she had no other options to earn a living except to stay with Frank, especially since she had moved to her family, to Jacksonville to be with him, and away from her mother and everyone else she knew that might

have been able to help her. And sadly, abuse was pretty normal for Nanny. While she may have pined for a romance, like the ones she read about in the paper and magazines, she never saw any real-life examples of healthy relationships. With all of those factors taken together, it's pretty clear to see why Nanny couldn't just leave or even kill Frank without some serious planning. It was a very complicated situation that kept Nanny in place, and this equilibrium kept Nanny in place for a very long time without significant incident. But things changed in 1945. At first glance, it looked like Nanny's fortunes were changing in the early 1940s.

Although she was still married to Frank, her eldest daughter Melvina had recently married and had one son, Robert, with the second baby on the way. Despite her past, Nanny was even apparently a doting grandmother to Little Robert and was passionate about baking. But if it's not clear by now, appearance. Can Be Deceiving. Nanny's marriage was worsening by the day. Both she and her husband turned to alcoholism to cope with the crushing poverty that seemed to be waiting for them behind every corner. Nanny knew she had to do something to save herself from poverty by any means necessary. And that's when she had an awful idea. You see, when Nanny killed her own children, money hadn't been a driving factor. Since the amount she received in life insurance didn't amount to much. But now she looked at her grandson, Robert. and saw a way to earn a lot of money very quickly.

She took out a policy on Robert for $500, close to $7,000 in today's currency, and calmly waited for opportunity to strike. You see, Melvina often left two-year-old Robert in nanny's care, trusting her mother to take good care of the little boy. But that trust was irrevocably broken when Robert suddenly died while being watched over by his grandmother, and doctors were completely stumped as to what could.

have happened. The official cause of death was asphyxia or unintentional suffocation, which could be caused by many types of injury or illness. Such as respiratory disease, seizures, accidental drowning, or being smothered by a pillow. Whatever the true cause of Robert's death, we'll never know, since Nanny didn't give any hint in her confession as to how she killed Robert. But we do know for a fact that she collected his life insurance a few weeks later, and if her family suspected anything, They didn't take it to the police. Not even Frank, who reportedly said at Little Roberts' funeral, I'll be next.

So was Frank next? Did Nanny finally decide to poison her husband? Well, that depends. Nanny's next murder may have been even more diabolical than her killing her grandson, but she never confessed to it, so we don't know for sure. But according to her daughter, Melvina, Nanny might have had a hand in killing another one of her grandchildren as well. And heads up on this one, listeners.

whether or not this particular bit is true, it's pretty gruesome. Listener discretion is advised. Nanny had been with Melvina throughout her second pregnancy and was by her side throughout the entire difficult birth. While the child died soon after birth, the doctors attributed her death to natural causes, but Melvina had a different story. Shortly after the birth, when the doctors left her and Nanny alone with the baby,

she thought she saw her mother stick a hatpin into her brain, killing her. But since Melvina had been groggy from labor and the ether used to sedate her, she wasn't sure whether or not she had actually seen her mother murder her daughter. And she didn't think she'd be taken seriously in her state. So once again, she didn't take her story to the police, and another one of her children died mysteriously in Nanny's care. What's most shocking about this case in hindsight is how willing members of Nanny's family were to look the other way when they suspected she committed these awful murders. It's hard to determine the specific reason why her daughters and husbands never went to the

police for help, but we can surmise that they may have mirrored many of the reasons why Nanny stayed with her abusive husbands for so long. Melvina relied on Nanny to help raise her children and was probably afraid that if she tried to leave with them, Nanny would retaliate against her. Frank also relied on Nanny to bail him out of jail when he'd had too much to drink, and like Charlie before him, was too afraid of his wife. violent outbursts to even think of getting a divorce. By keeping quiet, Nanny's family allowed her to kill again and again.

And this time, as Frank had predicted, it would be his turn to die. In September of 1945, two months after Robert's death, America celebrated the surrender of Japanese forces and the close of the Second World War. Frank went out for a night of particularly heavy drinking to celebrate, and when he returned home, he raped Nassau. Nanny in a drunken stupor. Now, she had been beaten and abused many times before during her 16-year marriage, but this was the last straw.

The next morning, she found Frank's jug of corn whiskey lying on the lawn outside and topped it off with liquid rat poison. Arsenic. Frank died later that evening, with symptoms eerily similar to those of Nanny's two deceased daughters. But since Nanny's daughter's deaths had happened in Nanny's hometown of Blue Mountain, and Frank had been killed in Jacksonville, Jacksonville police didn't make the connection and ruled that Frank had died of natural causes. She had officially gotten away with the same trick twice,

and as she left town shortly after her second husband's death, she would get away with it many more times to come. We'll discuss the fateful end of Nanny's next three husbands, as well as a few more branches of her family tree on next week's show. We'll also tell you the story of how this Black Widow finally got caught in her own web. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Serial Killers. Come back next week for the conclusion of the Nanny Doss story. Don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or any other podcast directory, or through our website, parkast.com, spelled P-A-R-C-C-A-S-T-com.

A new episode of Serial Killers comes out every Monday. Please let us know what you think and join the conversation on our Parcast Facebook page. You can tweet us at Parkast Network. That's P-A-R-C-A-S-T network. As always, we thank you for listening. Have a killer week. Serial Killers was created by Max Cutler and developed by Ron Cutler. It is a production

of Cutler media and is part of the Parcast Network. It is produced by Max and Ron Cutler, sound design by Ron Shapiro with production assistance by Joel Stein and Maggie Admeyer. Serial Killers is written by Jordan Lyric and stars Greg Poulson and Vanessa Richardson. The amazing cast of voice actors includes by alphabetical order,

Janice Leibart and Steve Pinto. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed, and there was a full of blood. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two, is out now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A beloved 75-year-old man washing up,

getting ready for bed, is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not crime beat. Search for and follow the away.

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